NECROCORE (Game Design)

GAME INFO

CONTRIBUTIONS

DESIGN GOALS

Create a fast paced first person shooter that combines elements from old-school retro shooters with the mobility and ability management of modern shooters.

Utilize elements from rogue-lites such as acquiring perks and weapons from random drops to create a replayable experience.

Create a game that appeals to my personal interests in Sci-Fi, Lovecraftian creatures, and grungy/emo 2D art.

UNITY PROTOTYPE

First iteration of the project was created as a passion project in a little under a month inside of unity. This version of the project contained 7 weapons, 4 enemy types, 4 abilities,1 boss at the end, a variety of movement options, and a couple rooms and hallways to create combat scenarios.
The 7 weapons included 4 standard weapons and 3 unique weapons. For the 3 unique weapons I wanted to create unique variations of the standard weapons. This included an automatic shotgun, a sniper rifle that would stun enemies, and a machine gun that would instantly reload when killing an enemy. I wanted to try and create a variety of weapons that would appeal to different playstyles and experiment with unique behaviors that would expand on the basic gameplay and identity of the standard weapon types.
For the abilities I wanted to create and showoff different elements and status affects to experiment with how players would use each in combat encounters. Abilities includes a fireball that would cause AOE and burn targets dealing damage over time, an ice shard that would spawn over enemies and freeze them for a limited time, an electric grapple that would apply a debuff on enemies and allow for close range play, and lastly create a personal barricade to experiment with defensive/utility options.
Enemies included a basic melee enemy with 3 variants of ranged enemies, and a very simple boss that would remain stationary while firing projectiles towards the player.

PROTOTYPE CONCLUSION

Overall this prototype was a quick and rough way to try and implement as many ideas and features into the initial idea for the game to see what worked and what didn't. This would provide some invaluable feedback which would greatly help the next iteration of the game in Unreal Engine. Almost every mechanic or idea would go on to be streamlined, altered, and improved thanks to this small protoype.

THE SWITCH TO UNREAL ENGINE

Switching to unreal engine allowed me to build the game from the ground up based on feedback and was a nice excuse to try my hand at learning to develop in Unreal Engine.
Besides including actual art and moving away from greyboxes, just about every system saw a massive design change.

WEAPONS

One of the biggest changes from the prototype is that instead of having standard weapons with unique variants, weapons were redesigned to instead have more personality and character outright. Each weapon instead focuses on behaving drastically different from each other, and the player's equipped ability is instead attached to the weapon to help enforce the weapon's playstyle.
Instead of just having a machine gun, the automatic weapon now increases fire-rate as it continues to fire, or instead of having a basic shotgun its now been changed to be a single shot pulse cannon that has little to no range and a long reload, but deals a ton of damage and allows the player to grapple enemies towards them.
The change in philosophy to how each weapon would be designed helped greatly to bring more personality out of the guns.

ENEMIES

One piece of feedback that I got regarding the very basic enemies from the prototype was that they didn't have any specific roles in combat that would force the player to prioritize different enemies.
I decided to focus on 4 main enemy types. The first enemy type was a basic melee enemy that would rush the player and attempt to keep pressure on them. The next were flying sentries, they had much less health but moved much more sporadically and would try to overwhelm the player by firing projectiles from the air. The most dangerous enemy type were the ground ranged variants who would fire 3 projectiles in a burst and would occasionally dash left or right if the player was aiming towards them. The last enemy type was a healer who would float around and provide constant health regeneration to all enemies around them. In the end we had a variety of different enemies that focused on applying pressure to the player in different ways.
The last major addition to the enemies were the inclusion of "Chosen Enemies". These were unique and "elite" variants of the standard enemies who came equipped with a barrier that would reduce bullet damage and would give the enemy an extra layer of health. This was to help encourage the ability play from players and help add more variety to the enemy types.

PLAYER MOVEMENT

In comparison from the prototype I focused on removing some unnecessary movement features. I tried experimenting with double jumping and wall-running but found that these features didn't actually benefit the pacing of the game.
Instead I focused on having movement that focused more on fast-paced grounded gameplay. Giving the player fast directional movement speed, a directional dash and only a single jump. For me this was a great example of being able to do more with less.

ABILITIES & STATUS EFFECTS

Instead of giving the player 4 abilities, abilities were made to be tied to each weapon and only one ability would be active at a time. (Player's are allowed to hold two weapons). This helped to streamline abilities as to not overwhelm the player, and give the player choice over what ability they want equipped at a time. Abilities were also tied to a mana system instead of a cooldown, with each kill returning mana to the player to try and create additional synergy to the ability and gunplay.
More emphasis was also put on more defensive and utility skills. (3 skills were for damage and 3 for utility). This decision was made to try and make sure that each ability complimented the playstyle of the weapon is was attached too.
The last major change was removing the frost status effect and instead focusing on burn and shock. Burn would still be a damage over time effect and shock would now simply stun an enemy in place and prevent them from attacking.

CONCLUSION

Overall this was one of my personal favorite projects to work on. It was a project that I really felt like I was able to put on own personality into and really allowed me to grow alongside the project as constant feedback and iteration from peers and professors allowed me to adapt and continue to build on top of the foundation.

Michael Benavides